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#21 flexbackup specifies wrong command line option for mbuffer
Flexbackup uses either the buffer or mbuffer program to help streaming tape drives from thrashing. The buffer program uses the -p command line option to specify the percentage the buffer to fill before writing data. Alas, mbuffer's command line is insidiously incompatible with buffer in this: it uses -P (capital P) instead of -p (lowercase p) to mean the same thing. In mbuffer -p (lowercase p) is for read buffer starvation control as opposed to write buffer fill control. Since flexbackup uses -p for both buffer and mbuffer, flexbackup causes a lot of tape drive thrashing when mbuffer is used, since the write buffer fill control is not specified. I've included a patch that corrects this issue.
In addition, the "find" command line that is constructed to identify files to backup is awfully complex. In figuring out how to properly specify directories to prune, I made a small change to the program itself to log the pruning regex and added some informative comments to the "flexbackup.conf" file. The patch also applies both of these small changes.
- John
Patch applies all changes recommended in bug.